Northern Australia – let’s not reinvent the wheel

Northern Australia, according to Tony Abbott, should not be seen as the last frontier, but the “next frontier".

As part of the push to show the Coalition’s “vision", he announced on Friday that the Coalition would produce a white paper on the development of northern Australia within 12 months of election.

The good thing about the “vision" statement is that it has toned down all the wackier ideas, like zonal taxation, that the Coalition has floated, – egged on by mining magnate Gina Rinehart – and come up with much vaguer promises to look at such proposals in the future.

With a couple of exceptions. It seems, for example, the Coalition thinks it’s okay to dip into the foreign aid budget to fund the development of tropical health and medical research facilities, and the training of health workers, in the far north.

But to those people really interested in developing northern Australia, there will be something very familiar about many of the goals and solutions being proposed.

Related Quotes

Company Profile

For example, the white paper will “consider policy options", including “establishing a high-level Northern Australia Strategic Partnership comprising the Prime Minister, the Premiers of Queensland and WA and the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory".

Good-o. Except we already have a Northern Australia Ministerial Forum which comprises all the ministers responsible for regional development and agriculture from the federal and WA, Queensland and Northern Territory governments.

It has meetings! It has a website which contains all the communiques of its meetings!

A meeting last week looked at just the sort of issues that the Coalition says it will need to have a white paper to consider options about.

It met with a delegation from China to discuss investment in a northern foodbowl.

No-one is suggesting that northern Australia shouldn’t be a priority, it’s just that the policy released by the Coalition doesn’t ultimately offer much that is different to what various governments are already doing, other than rebadging it in an exercise that would lose even more time.